WELCOMING O’BALDWIN TO NEW YORK.
The Irish Giant, Joe Coburn, Ed. James, J. C. Heenan.
ADVICE TO BUSINESS MEN AND OTHERS.
The majority of our readers are doubtless young men having in view perfecting their frames for some muscular feat, and the bulk of this work was written principally for their benefit. There is still another and larger class for whom no author seems to have troubled his head about. We allude to those compelled by circumstances to spend their time in sedentary occupations, and are not likely to get time or means to pursue a regular course of training.
It would be simply ridiculous to advise a letter-carrier to take exercise after going his rounds of forty or fifty miles a day, as physicians sometimes do without being aware of the calling of their patient, or to suggest fasting forty days and nights for dyspepsia because Dr. Tanner did it, giving no impossibilities or absurdities, but such as we are willing to practice and carry out. As a general thing, to keep down flesh, if inclined to corpulency, avoid sugar, salmon, eels, herrings, pork, potatoes, beer, bread, butter, milk, champagne, port and anything calculated to create bile. It would be well to dispense with fat meats, eggs, pastry, new bread, cheese and whatever else may produce nausea or indigestion after eating.
Before making your morning toilet, a sponge saturated in tepid salt water should be applied to all parts of the body, and then rubbed dry with a Turkish towel. If too much of a shock to the system, apply a flesh-brush or the palm of your hands vigorously to the skin, after which the sponge bath, and when dry the brush or hand, as before. When the shower-bath is used, and a person feels exhilarated from its effects, it is better than the sponge bath; but when it produces a shiver or weakness, it should be discontinued until strong enough to indulge in this great summer luxury.
The mere fact that millions of human beings are strong and healthy upon a purely vegetable diet should of itself suggest that, although animal food, as more concentrated, and yielding more force with less expenditure in its digestion, is superior to vegetable food, yet there is excellent nutriment to be extracted from vegetables. The anatomical indications of man, being omnivorous, should also point in the same direction, and the need of vegetable acids, no less than the advantages of variety, at once disclose the error of banishing vegetable food. The chief mistake lies in the cooking. The water in which green vegetables are cooked is poisonous. There is not one house in fifty where the vegetables are not cooked in small vessels, containing very little water, which is never changed, and where the greens are sent to table with the water properly squeezed from them. Let any person unable to eat broccoli, or greens cooked in a quart of water, try the effect of having them cooked in a gallon of water, or of having the quart changed three or four times during the process, and he will soon discover the difference. If potatoes are “watery,” it is because they are ill-cooked. No Irishwoman serves up watery potatoes.
Veal and pork are rigidly excluded by the trainer, which some will hear it with amazement, and will ask how it was that the ancients gave the athletes nothing but pork. Would the old hen be thought nutritious, and the chicken injurious? Would the sheep be tender, and the lamb tough? And why is the calf to be blooded, and the ox not? Yet, so long as this practice continues, no one should indulge in veal, unless his digestion be vigorous. Fried dishes, rich gravies and pastry should also be avoided, because of their tendency to develop fatty acids in the stomach. Some cannot endure fat; others cannot get on without it. Some cannot touch mutton; others are made ill by eggs. Let each find out his own idiosyncrasy. The only thing the trainer teaches us is to take abundant exercise in the open air, and to be simple and moderate in our diet, with regularity in hours. If neither time nor strength permits our abundant exercise, and if our avocations prevent regularity, what remains but moderation in diet?
The effects of exercise are two-fold: on the one hand a stimulus is given to the action of the heart and lungs, which enables the blood to be more thoroughly oxygenated and more rapidly circulated; on the other hand, there is an expenditure force, accompanying the increased activity of the organic changes. Exercise strengthens the parts exercised, because it increases the nutrition of those parts. When any organ is inactive, the circulation in it becomes less and less, the smaller ramifications of its network of blood vessels are empty or but half filled, the streams gradually run in fewer channels, and the organ, ceasing to be thoroughly nourished, wastes away. When the organ is active all its vessels are filled; all the vital changes, on which depend its growth and power, proceed rapidly. The force expended is renewed, unless the expenditure has been excessive, in which case there is a disturbance of the mechanism, and depression or disease results. But unless there has been excess, we see that the great advantage of exercise consists in keeping up a due equalization of the circulation, an equable distribution of nutrition to the various organs. Perfect health means the equable activity of all the functions; not the vigor of the muscular system alone, nor of the nervous system alone; not the activity of this gland or that, but the equable vigor of all. Remember that when life makes great demands upon the muscular energy, the demands upon the brain must be less; and when the demands upon the brain are energetic, there is less force disposable for muscles and glands. The advantage of exercise to a student or any other brain-worker, is that it lessens the over-stimulus of his brain, distributes the blood more equably, calling to his muscles some of those streams which would impetuously be rushing through his brain. And understanding what this advantage is, he should be careful to avail himself of it; but he should be careful to remember at the same time that within certain limits all the force with drawn by his muscles is withdrawn from the brain or some other organ. He must not burn the candle at both ends.